Carrying the Burden of Longevity

I met Meryl Comer once, briefly, at a conference, and recall the juxtaposition of her sleek beauty and harrowing personal story: her husband, once chief of hematology and oncology at the National Institutes of Health, debilitated by early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and her mother with the late-onset variety, both living in her suburban Maryland home, under her care.

Now Ms. Comer has filled in the blanks in that bare-bones version of her day-to-day life in this riveting and necessary, if flawed, book, “Slow Dancing With a Stranger,” in which Ms. Comer takes you down the black hole where she has lived for 20 years, with no end in sight.

She argues persuasively that we can’t “age-proof our lives” and that this disease, “the dark side of longevity,” is a “looming health catastrophe” for us all. “My greatest fear,” she writes, “is that mine will be the family next door by midcentury.”

Once in a while, her account is too polemical, despite her tireless advocacy for early testing and prevention trials. Yet hers is not just talk. She is in such a trial, has been tested and has two genetic markers for the disease. (All proceeds from this book will go to Alzheimer’s research.)

Sometimes, the account is self-serving, a “there is no problem I can’t solve” kind of litany: She outfits her husband, Dr. Harvey R. Gralnick, now 77, with shin guards like a lacrosse player’s to prevent injury during his frantic pacing. After he becomes violent, she installs the equivalent of rearview mirrors throughout the house so she can see him coming around corners.

Sometimes, the account is hard to follow, the chronology and geography muddled. When and for how long was her husband sedated and cuffed in leather restraints in a locked ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital? Were they home or in an institutional setting when — his fists clenched until his fingernails turned blue — he knocked out her front teeth as she tried to wash his groin?

Then there is Ms. Comer’s prickly mother, alone on the Jersey Shore for much of the narrative. (She is still alive, at 94.) When did she join the household? How many stops were there in between? Where was the old woman when she called 911 to report that her daughter, now 70, was holding her against her will?

Ms. Comer notes that her mother “didn’t like Harvey,” an understatement given that at another point, she asks: “Who is that man over there? The one you married? He didn’t deserve you. I hope you got rid of him.”

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Slow Dancing with a Stranger Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer's. By Meryl Comer. HarperOne. 240 pages. $26.99.CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

But these quibbles do not detract from the author’s success in achieving her stated goal: to deliver the “unvarnished reality” of Alzheimer’s. The good news and the bad news about this book are the same: It is very painful to read, as well it should be.

From the first, Ms. Comer writes, her husband’s work was paramount. Holidays were ignored and vacations canceled. He accepted a two year sabbatical in France when they were practically newlyweds and went without her. He refused to wear a wedding ring and was “not generous with expressions of love.”

One Christmas season, making an unusual trip home in the middle of her workday, she caught him in bed with another woman — the marital bed in disarray, gift wrapping from presents exchanged, flutes of stale Champagne, embers in the fireplace. She did not speak to him for weeks, then moved out and filed for separation. But she took pity on him in the midst of a home renovation and let him stay with her for a month that turned into a year.

Maybe, she writes, it was an early disease symptom, overlapping other changes in his behavior. “The cruelty of Alzheimer’s offended me more than his infidelity,” she writes, “and I couldn’t hold onto my outrage. ...Alzheimer’s had saved our marriage.”

The marriage — Dr. Gralnick’s third, Ms. Comer’s second — is a psychological puzzle that winds through the book. She is smart as a whip, a former business journalist, yet turns a blind eye to their extravagant lifestyle and is unaware her husband has no long-term-care insurance or end-of-life documents, leaving his wishes a mystery.

Dr. Gralnick drove a yellow Porsche 911. He wore custom-made clothes. He dabbled in wine futures. Yet his wife is angered by the temerity of friends who ask if he would have done for her what she was doing for him; she hedges by replying, “Who among us can know with certainty how we will act until the middle of a crisis?”

Privately, she knows better. “He would have done whatever he could to get me the best medical attention and put me in the right clinical trials,” she writes. “But would he have abandoned his career to care for me, bathe me, diaper me, dress me, feed me, cater to my behaviors and personal needs? I doubt it. No, I know it.”

Long after doctors had predicted he would be dead, Dr. Gralnick is still in a wheelchair, incontinent, glassy-eyed, drooling and unable to speak. “Sometimes,” his wife writes, “wanting to recapture the sound and vigor of his lost voice, I pressed the message on our answering machine.

“Over and over I heard him say, ‘Hello, Meryl and I are not home right now.’ ” It is a fitting refrain for this heartbreaking book.

Jane Gross, a retired reporter for The New York Times, is the originator of its blog The New Old Age and the author of “A Bittersweet Season: Caring For Our Aging Parents — and Ourselves.”

Slow Dancing With a Stranger:
Lost and Found in the Age of
Alzheimer’s. By Meryl Comer.
HarperOne. 240 pages. $26.99.